


burn

by sharksharp (unconventionaled)



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Book of Circus, Canon - Manga, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Child Murder, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Vomiting, man idk if that's the right tag but it's gonna have to do, those tags make it sound a lot worse than it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 20:07:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6254137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unconventionaled/pseuds/sharksharp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>he lights the match on the estate and feels himself catch fire</p>
            </blockquote>





	burn

**Author's Note:**

> a ciel character study for the end of the circus arc, because ciel is a gold mine of psychological fuckery.
> 
> reminder to all readers that thirteen year olds can't consent to romantic/sexual interactions with adults and it is the responsibility of the adult in any such situation to create boundaries.

Sebastian's arms are the only real things in the world.

All else falls to history, memories collapsing into the present like a house of cards, like the crumbling scaffolding of a burning building. The lines between this blood-soaked altar to the past and the heat of Ciel's own blood splattering his chest blur indistinguishably. He is ten years old, he is suspended in the cold snap of his own death, he is ten years old, he is trapped in his flame-wracked manor, his mother's body spilled over the ground at his feet. He is breathing in ash, he is alone, he is alone, he is-

The hand bracing his thigh, certain and implacable as steel, is real. His lungs, still raw and vulnerable, ache with heat and smoke. The collar of the wool coat he turns his face against, inhaling warmth of a less punishing kind, is real. When he faced his own death twice over, looked into the fetid maw of humanity and saw a blackness more complete than that he called to his side from hell's gape, he was alone. Sebastian carries him from a world abandoned by God to be razed to the ground, and the past splits itself back from the present. Since that day, Ciel has never been alone. For whatever remains of his short and brutal life, he never will be. 

No matter how many times he must face in the waking world the spectres of his nightmares, Sebastian remains. And so he will remain, until Ciel is lord over only the dead.

Ciel fists his hand, the dirtied one, against Sebastian's neck. Spit and sick have soaked through his silken gloves, leaving his skin cold, and probably rank beneath the consuming smell of fire. He doesn't care. Let it permeate Sebastian's clothes, let it streak across Sebastian's skin. It isn't enough to know he ruined Sebastian's glove along with his own, before it was lost in the fire. He must take everything Ciel is, every filthy, mortal inch. For as long as Ciel is forced to bear it Sebastian should be too.

Doll's voice pulls him from the press of his face against Sebastian's shoulder, his branded eye brighter and more furious than the fire raging behind them. The light throws all into sharp contrast, everything orange or black and constantly shifting. Hell is as cold and consuming as the sea, but had Ciel not touched it he might have mistaken it for flames. From a sweeter view, death and damnation don't look so different. He settles his head back against Sebastian's shoulder. This is what Hell feels like. A strength and power beyond knowing, barely leashed but certain beneath his hand, hingeing around a single word.

"Sebastian."

She crumples like the doll she is named for, and Ciel feels nothing at all.

\--

On the carriage ride back to the station, Ciel sleeps against Sebastian's shoulder. It takes him only three minutes to cede pride in the face of exhaustion. It's only Sebastian, after all. Sebastian, who has seen him at his shivering worst, who does not, _can_ not leave. Ciel finds himself too tired, even, to order Sebastian over to his seat, simply crawls onto the bench occupied by his butler, his hat and cane left behind him.

"Take your coat off." Ciel mutters the instruction against Sebastian's breast pocket, then refuses to move while he shrugs out of the offending garment, remaining as still as possible. Ciel tears his gloves off with his teeth, for a moment as bestial as Sebastian. They fall to the floor of the carriage like beetle husks, leaving his hand to curl white and frail beside his cheek. In a distant part of his mind Ciel hates how bare and young he is, tucking himself into the cradle of his butler's arm. But it is only Sebastian. 

He falls asleep instantly, granted peace by even his dreams.

\--

Sebastian wakes him before the carriage stills. Ciel pulls back into consciousness with the acrid taste of vomit at the back of his mouth and the smell of smoke oppressive around him. He is ten years old, his world is burning, he- 

The first edge of a cry tears its way up his shredded throat before he manages to silence himself, forcing his eyes open to find only the rocking of a carriage, Sebastian's chest warm and predictable beneath his cheek. His right eye, still exposed, spills light onto his own clenched fist, stubbornly refusing to dim.

Ciel doesn't have to look up to see Sebastian's wry smile, the edges of his voice curling around it. "Did the young master have a nightmare?"

"No." He snaps back into his own seat, spine regulation-straight, an arrogant tilt to his chin in defiance of the spit crusted at the corner of his mouth, the way his hair rucks up in the back like pinion feathers. "How much time until we arrive?"

As fluid as Ciel was harsh, Sebastian kneels before him. The carriage jostles, as carriages are wont to do, yet his balance wavers not at all. At times, Ciel is still taken aback by it, his breath drawn for a single second short as all the power Sebastian embodies presents itself to him, servile. But already long, bare fingers comb through his hair, returning him to his rightful state, and Ciel has neither the time nor patience for marvels. "By my estimate-" Sebastian's estimate is always good- "we will arrive at the train station in approximately seven minutes." He ties Ciel's eye patch back on with a neat bow, then returns to his seat, handing him his gloves and his cane.

Ciel nods. The silk slips against his palm, slick and clean as if the events of the previous night were no more than fevered fantasy. A Phantomhive butler ought to be able to do that much. He pulls his gloves back on like a man and slides his ring over top.

\--

That Sebastian must share his compartment on the train bothers him little, bothers him not at all. In truth, that thin thing Ciel ever demands and rarely grants, he prefers it this way. The previous night crouches on his shoulder like a gargoyle, and he can still feel flames at his back. He can't sleep again, and left alone he would just think himself to festering, until his skin felt too tight and everything was unbearable without a mouth to bleed into. Sebastian is just a distraction, nothing more. One doesn't speak to his pieces to receive an answer, just to keep the silence from choking him. As company goes, Sebastian isn't terrible. He's fluent in Ciel's silences, seeks marrow in the bareness of his bones. It's as comforting as it is practical and infuriating. 

Sebastian sits across from him, on a bench much like the ones they just vacated. Ciel considers taking it for offense. He's human, he doesn't have to be logical or reasonable in his demands. Sebastian needs only to obey. But really, it isn't Sebastian who causes offense, though Ciel has no proof mockery doesn't curl behind his placid interest. It's himself he reviles, reminded all too clearly of how small he became in the lee of Sebastian's arm. By day it's all too clear he should have slept on his own side of the carriage rather than give into his instincts to seek heat, to seek comfort. The cold eye of the sun offers no sympathy. He is the Earl, and Sebastian only a butler. Only his grave.

Molecules spray up from where Sebastian's knife bites through the peel of the orange, visible only in the light slanting through the window, a scent made tangible. Ciel watches his hands as he works, saturating the fresh glove he must have pulled from an inner pocket of his clothes or of hell with the tang of fruit. He hasn't eaten in hours, closer to a day, but he plucks a section of orange from the peel delicately, biting down on the tip. An array of sacs spill forth from overstuffed flesh, full and ripe. Ciel pushes them into his mouth with the edge of his thumb, watching Sebastian from beneath the doe-like fringe of his eyelashes. He shrugs in the direction of the fruit - _you can have some, if you like_ \- and licks a bead of juice from his lower lip.

\-- 

The orange husk sits empty in a puddle of sun, one that doesn't quite extend to either occupant of the carriage. Ciel's fingers are marred with juice and that strange stickiness of pith. The clear bite of citrus in his mouth doesn't quite cover the lingering taste of bile, nor the ragged edge to his throat, blown raw by smoke and asthma and his own animal screaming. He considers his own fingers, the thin whiteness of them, then casts the glove he still wears to the seat beside him.

In a wave of black, Ciel bridges the space between them. The edges of his overcoat billow and settle around him, one leg between Sebastian's, the other knee braced on the seat. Like this, he is just barely taller than Sebastian. His left hand curls on Sebastian's neck, the right laid white and cool and still so small on Sebastian's cheek, the thumb bitter with orange against the dent of his demon's mouth. Ciel looks down at him as a material acquisition, hand painted bone china bought solely to have, to keep. His exposed eye takes in Sebastian's upturned face, still and placid and waiting on Ciel's order. Ciel hooks his thumb into the seam of that mouth and tears it wide before crushing his lips to his.

Sebastian smiles. Ciel tastes blood, Baron Kelvin's and Joker's and Doll's. Sebastian's lips are a crime scene that Ciel swallows whole. In Sebastian, he kisses all of hell, efficient and violent and inscrutable and _his_. Ciel aims to steal his breath and his cruelty for his own in one move, but he drinks from a well that will never run dry. He feels the rumbling baritone of Sebastian's chuckle in his bones. "So, young master." His mouth just barely moves even as his tongue flicks against the exposed flesh of Ciel's thumb, maintaining an absurd veneer of chastity over something inherently obscene. "This is the way things are?" It's not a question, or if it is, Ciel doesn't want to answer it. He simply leans into Sebastian and draws him deeper, tips his head back the way Ciel always finds himself tipped and lays waste to their private battlefield.

\--

Humans lie. They lie and they kill and they profane, all over a patch of ground falling to ruin. To expect to find truth at the center of this knot, once unraveled, was folly at its finest, an absurdity fit for the books. The circus, after all, is made of illusion, a fantastical landscape composed of lights and lies dripping from dishonest tongues. In all of this, this whole farcical case, the only thing that has been real is Sebastian.

Ciel laughs like a child, laughs like a monster, laughs like the sound it makes when the gates of Hell swing open, careless and raw and as honest a lie as he has ever told. 

In the end, all that remains is him and Sebastian, standing in the center of a corpse-strewn ruin, the one true thing in a deadly maze of lies. It's a preview, he thinks. Yesterday he returned to the beginning, and today he visits the end, the unburdened light of victory before the curtains fall on this play of theirs. One day, he and Sebastian will stand here again, the only real things in the world, and Sebastian will claim his soul. The last true thing Ciel will ever know.

Ciel extends one gloved hand towards Sebastian, still smiling. "Come on, Sebastian." He summons with a childish, perfect certainty that this barely-leashed demon will answer. "Let's go home."


End file.
